


Crushed Upon the Shore

by russian_blue



Category: Tokyo Babylon
Genre: Case Fic, Crueltide, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 17:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2781029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/russian_blue/pseuds/russian_blue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven years after Seishirou vanished, Subaru is still fulfilling his duty -- or trying to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crushed Upon the Shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shoujiki_Ippen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shoujiki_Ippen/gifts).



The house feels empty around Subaru when he steps across the threshold, murmuring a quiet apology. Not just uninhabited, but lifeless -- as if every human touch is gone from the place, leaving it hollow and cold.

It must have been different before. A loving couple, married almost seven years, with three children and a fourth on the way. It's unheard-of success, by the standards of modern Tokyo. They could even afford a nanny to help take care of the children. Subaru wanders from room to room, not touching anything, but taking note of it all: some parts decorated western-style, with comfortable chairs and a large TV; other parts Japanese, floored with tatami and furnished with antiques. They even had separate bedrooms for the children -- a phenomenal amount of space for the Sangubashi area.

This is what happiness is supposed to look like. But something always goes wrong.

Subaru finally settles down in one of the tatami rooms. He no longer bothers with ceremonial robes, except when Grandmother asks him to wear them, or the formality of the situation demands it. Once the props and trappings of onmyodo had helped, but these days all he needs are a few ofuda. Otherwise, jeans and a black shirt are fine, with a white coat over. It isn't the coat Hokuto bought him so long ago, but it's the closest he's found.

A house this nice, a family this happy -- it would have made somebody jealous. That happens all the time in Tokyo, where people are surrounded by reminders of what they don't have, the temptation to reach for more. Their envy, their anger, seeps out into the world around them, poisoning the good fortune of others -- especially if they think those others don't deserve it. He kneels in the middle of the tatami and folds his hands into a mudra, chanting in a soft monotone. If someone cursed this family, on purpose or by accident, some trace of it should linger here.

But no tremor answers his chant. Subaru pauses, frowning. Maybe elsewhere in the house? He ought to be able to feel it, though, even at this range. He takes a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lights one, then makes another circuit of the house, senses alert.

Nothing.

No echo of a curse, no furious ghost of the living or the dead to disturb the atmosphere. It's just as he felt when he walked in: empty. Lifeless.

But _something_ jinxed this family. All three children dead, from the youngest to the eldest, within six months of each other. Not from illness or accident, either. They just died, in their sleep. The last straw came when the wife miscarried. Thirty years old: Subaru doesn't know whether the curse got her unborn child, too, or whether the stress and grief of repeated loss made it happen naturally. It shattered her husband; he fled one night, without even leaving a note behind. She's in the hospital now, tied to her bed so she won't hurt herself. Subaru examined her already and found nothing. Just the tormented soul of a woman who rose to the perfect height of a dream, and then fell into the abyss. He did what he could for her, but it wasn't enough.

If she'ss clean of any spiritual influence, and so is the house, then he has no choice but to turn to the children. Subaru hates to do that: they aren't haunting anybody, so raising their spirits will only disturb whatever peace they've found. The police haven't been able to find the husband, though, so he doesn't have any other choice. Except to give up -- and he isn't ready to do that. The wife's father asked this of him, trying to maintain his composure and failing. He doesn't want to let the man down.

Subaru grinds out his cigarette in a sink and washes the ashes down the drain. Then he goes to look up the address of the cemetery where the children are buried.  


* * *

  
Going to a cemetery at night smacks of black magic, but Subaru has long since gotten tired of strangers watching him or even interrupting while he works. There's something dubious about a young man chanting and laying out a pentagram in a graveyard, and he can't exactly hang up a sign reassuring them he's a professional on assignment.

He's never liked calling up the spirits of the dead. It's never the happy ones he has to call; it's always those who have been murdered, or who committed suicide to end their pain. The effects of it stay with him for days. Still, it's better than allowing the living to continue in their own torment.

The family is wealthy enough to afford a nice plot in the cemetery, and somebody -- likely the grandfather -- has left fresh flowers. The names are carved into the stone: Haruka, Kaori, Taro. The parents' names above are painted in red, Yuna and Hoshio, waiting for them to join their children.

He sets his ofuda at the five points of the star and stands in the center with his hands intertwined, chanting. It might be safer to call them one at a time, but he has a better chance of figuring out what killed them if he can feel the connections between the three. It can't be anything _they_ did; the youngest wasn't even two yet when he died. But if magic ended their lives, then traces will hang on them -- the traces he wasn't able to pick up at the house.

Subaru finishes his chant.

No sooner does the last word leave his mouth than a blast of wind slams him to his knees. He's in the center of a storm, a howling maelstrom that tears away at his barriers and threatens to flay his spirit from his flesh.

_Sakanagi._ The backlash from powerful magic, returning to its caster -- that's what killed the children. They were sacrifices, innocent human lives thrown away to protect someone evil.

He locks his fingers together, chanting again. Somewhere out there are his ofuda, holding down the points of the star; he finds those five anchors and grounds himself in them, a pocket of stillness at the heart of the storm. This isn't a spell, actively trying to kill him -- just the remnants of something done months before. He makes himself serene, and spreads that serenity outward until the winds are gone.

Subaru comes back to himself in the middle of the cemetery. All around him are fallen leaves and branches, torn loose by the storm. The flowers in front of the grave are scattered across the gravel, the vase shattered.

Tomorrow he'll come clean that up, but right now he has a more pressing concern. There must have been something he missed at the house.  


* * *

  
This time he doesn't just walk through. He opens drawers, looks under furniture, checks behind objects on the shelves. Nobody can pull off that kind of magic or that kind of sacrifice without some kind of training, even if it's just a book they only half-understand -- and nobody but a family member would be close enough to use the children as their shield. Or the nanny, he supposes; the children were in her care. If he doesn't find anything here, he'll look into her next.

But his hand stops on a picture frame. It's empty except for a shard of glass still protruding from one edge. Yuna went berserk after her husband left, wrecking the place in her anguish; the grandfather said he'd cleaned it up, but hadn't touched anything apart from that. Is the trash still here?

It is. Subaru digs through the bin, searching. A piece of glass cuts his unprotected fingers. But it leads him to what he's hunting: a photograph, scratched where the shattered edges dug in.

The instant he touches it, memories overwhelm him.  


* * *

  
She knew her husband didn't love her. But that was okay: he brought home enough money for their growing family to live in comfort, even luxury. And she loved _him_ \-- completely, hopelessly, without reservation. He let her do it, and that was enough.

The memory of that love burns in the marrow of Subaru's bones. He knows what that is like: loving someone who doesn't love you back, who isn't _capable_ of loving you back. Through Yuna, he feels everything he never got to have, everything he still dreams of, even though he knows it's wrong. Her husband's kiss, devoid of passion, but she melted into it anyway, providing all the fire he lacked. His touch on her body, marking her, claiming her as his own. Subaru is marked, too, in the stars on the backs of his hands. He is the Sakurazukamori's prey, as she was her husband's. He isn't a child anymore, sixteen years old and confused, too ignorant of his own heart to understand what he wanted. He knows, and what he knows writes itself over the memories from the photograph, until it is him stretched out on the bed, with Seishirou kneeling over him, smiling down with his blind right eye.  


* * *

  
The photograph crumples in his hand: Yuna, happy in her delusion, and her husband, tall and handsome, blind in his right eye.

From behind him comes the deep, familiar voice: "I expected you to figure it out before now."

Even turning to face him hurts. But turn Subaru does, like a magnet pulled to its mate, and there he is: Sakurazuka Seishirou, seven years older, but not much changed. Dark suit, broad shoulders, a pair of sunglasses dangling from his fingers. A faint smile on his face. How long has he been watching? More than long enough.

Subaru swallows hard. It feels like a rock has lodged in his throat. "You married her. Just to have children. And then you killed them all."

"Yes," Seishirou says, utterly indifferent. "My veterinary business had ended -- and besides, animals wouldn't have been enough for this. The backlash is equal in power to the spell itself, and I was working some very powerful spells."

"Why?" The word he's been longing to speak for seven years, clawing its way out of him and leaving blood behind. Too many whys. Why the children, why Hokuto, why the year of lies. Why is he the Sakurazukamori.

Seishirou laughs quietly. "Come now, Subaru-kun. Do you really think I'm going to tell you? The Promised Day hasn't come."

"I thought it came seven years ago."

"For you and me, yes," he says. "But not for the world. That day is not yet here."

Subaru ought to ask what he means, but he can't bring himself to. He still aches with the memory of Yuna's hopeless love. And Seishirou knows it, too; his gaze flicks to the photograph, and his smile deepens. "Did you enjoy what you saw there?"

"No," Subaru says.

The lie accomplishes nothing. "I would have done that for you," Seishirou says. "If you had figured out sooner what you wanted. I promised myself that I would do everything I could to make you happy, just as if I loved you. I killed to protect you, Subaru-kun. I gave up my eye for you. I would have done anything you asked."

He can't ask, even now. This isn't his friend Sei-chan; it's the Sakurazukamori, the man who killed Hokuto. She wanted Subaru to want something for himself, wanted him to care so much about _something_ that he wouldn't give it up, not even for his duty as the leader of the Sumeragi. She succeeded -- but not in the way she meant to.

But even though he's spent all these years preparing, he can't bring himself to fight. He isn't ready. All the skill he's built up, all the strength -- it isn't enough. Not against Seishirou.

And so he stands frozen, pinned like a butterfly to a card, while Seishirou steps forward and takes the photograph from his nerveless fingers. He studies it for a moment; then it goes up in flames, a brief flare of light before ashes fall to the tile beneath them. "I can't have you remembering this," Seishirou says. "Soon enough the time will come -- but not yet."

Subaru tenses. For an instant he's nine years old again, standing under a cherry tree; he's sixteen, watching that echo of the past. An echo that was gutted, everything that mattered stripped out of it, so that he met Seishirou and fell in love with him, never remembering the blood that was on the older man's hands.

Maybe he can't bring himself to fight -- but he won't let Seishirou take his memories away again.

He knocks away the hand that rises toward his face. Seishirou shoves him, hard, knocking him to the ground, but he rolls with it and springs back to his feet. Except now he's too close to the wall, and Seishirou, taller and heavier, drives him back into it and traps him there, pinning him against the boards so that he can't escape anymore. Now their fight is mind-to-mind, onmyoji against onmyoji, Sumeragi against Sakurazukamori. This time there's no chanting: just the pure strain of their struggle, Subaru keeping the intrusion out by will alone. And he is, against all his expectations, succeeding.

But the Sakurazukamori does not fight fair.

Seishirou's mouth closes over his. The kiss paralyzes him, sweeping all thoughts from his mind. It is everything Sei-chan teased at in their year together, everything his teenaged brain could not bring itself to imagine, but longed for all the same. There's no passion in it: that would be a lie, and he could resist a lie. This is domination, Seishirou claiming him, owning him, until Subaru's knees buckle and his enemy is the only thing holding him up.

And a traitorous part of him thinks, _no, please. Don't make me forget this._

As if what he wants matters in the slightest. Seishirou pulls back, just far enough to speak, his breath warm in Subaru's ear.

"We will see each other again, Subaru-kun -- on the Promised Day."  


* * *

  
Subaru comes to his senses kneeling on the tatami. There are ofuda around him at the points of the star; some of the antiques have fallen, as if blown by a great wind.

He can't remember banishing the spirit that killed the children. His ofuda are intact, though, and he's unhurt, so he must have succeeded. But he is trembling and dizzy -- he staggers when he rises to his feet. His fingers are bleeding, and he can't remember why.

It doesn't matter. One more job completed. One more duty for the Sumeragi, fulfilled. None of it is what he truly wants to do.

Except . . .

He's thought for years that he wants to kill Seishirou. He _ought_ to want that. Vengeance for Hokuto, justice for everyone else the Sakurazukamori has murdered. But when Subaru imagines himself coming face to face with his enemy . . . he knows, in his gut, that he won't be able to do it. He's tried for seven years to carve Seishirou out of his heart, and failed.

Because what hurts most isn't even Hokuto's death -- though it should be. No, what hurts most is the fact that Seishirou left him alive. Just walked away, because Subaru didn't even mean enough to him to be worth killing.

But _that_ , he might be able to change.

He can learn and grow stronger. And some day -- some day soon -- perhaps he will be strong enough to make his true wish come to pass.  


* * *

  


風をいたみ  
岩うつ波の  
おのれのみ  
くだけて物を  
思ふ頃かな

_Like a driven wave,_   
_dashed by fierce winds on a rock,_   
_so am I: alone_   
_and crushed upon the shore,_   
_remembering what has been._

Minamoto no Shigeyuki  
13th century

 

**Author's Note:**

> Canonically, Subaru and Seishirou don't meet again until the events of X/1999.
> 
> Canonically, Seishirou also has a habit of fucking around with Subaru's memories.


End file.
